project 02 // flow-e // Product

role

product _ experience designer // interface designer

I was the sole product designer in a team of 5. My role started by recognizing users who work with email excessively, identify where they were struggling in the process and determine the fittest solutions for it.

Who are we designing for?

People who get 100+ emails a day

Someone who communicates with a high number and wide variety of people in the course of a single day through email. Enthusiast of efficiency and someone who is running many parallel projects with hundreds of stakeholders, that wants to keep the communication Lean.

What is the problem we are trying to solve?

Email clients are productivity tools but the way they present email is often too rigid for the way we currently work with email.

The truth is, today we need a seamless way to manage emails as tasks, in addition to tracking to-dos, monitoring our time, staying organized, and balancing multiple projects and priorities at once. The existing email clients folder-and-flag system isn’t complex enough to meet our rapidly changing needs.

How are we going to solve it?

A Lean email process can actually save your inbox.

It has the potential to keep you on the ball when it comes to incoming messages and the actionable work items that come flooding in along with them.

But why?

flow-e was born out of our desire to apply Lean to the inbox.

As students of Lean and power users of email, we couldn’t help but see the connection between the methodology we were using to run our organization and the development of our original product, Kanbanize, and the challenges we faced when it came to our inbox.

What Is Lean Methodology anyway?

Long story short, Lean represents an emphasis on creating as much value as possible without wasting any resources in the process.

Design Approach

Dividing the inbox interface between a feed of incoming mail and a visual email workflow provides a better way to differentiate between the stages of your communication.

The email that makes it into the workflow will be the actionable communication only – everything else needs to be sorted out. Within the visual email workflow, actionable emails move through predefined stages but remain visible at all times. The columns that represent these stages in the workflow are customizable to suit your process.